Small changes have a powerful impact over time

In Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, Eckels hires Time Safari, Inc., to take him back to the Late Cretaceous to hunt a Tyrannosaurus Rex. When he faces his quarry, he loses all bravado and panics. He leaves the path, steps on a butterfly, and alters the present-day. Words are spelled differently. The other candidate won the election.

McCoy steps through the Guardian of Forever and stops Edith Keeler from being hit by a car. Keeler delays the US’s entry into World War II, Germany wins, and the Federation ceases to exist mid-sentence.

Marty McFly saves his father from getting hit by a car (different car) and almost erases himself from existence. Barry Allen saves his mother from getting killed when he was a child and… you get the picture.

It’s a trope of science fiction. Time travelers are always concerned about changing the present by making some small change in the past, but we never think that we can seriously change the future by making some small change today.

Is “just in case” worth the risk?

When the Apple Watch was first introduced, there was a lot of optimism about the new ways it would enable us to be productive. One of the common questions was whether you would be able to wear it in the shower to talk to Siri.

I understand the question. We can come up with some great ideas in the shower. This might be the only time we have to step back from a problem and think about it, and Siri gives us a way to capture those key insights.

If you really can’t go 10 minutes without talking to Siri, then yes. Yes, you can wear your Apple Watch (series 2 or later) in the shower. With some precautions, you won’t even break it.

You’re probably doing better in some areas of your life than in others. How do you know where you should set goals to improve? And what’s the one limiting belief that’s holding you back more than anything?

And what will you do when you have all three?

There are three things you need in order to do anything, whether it’s productive work or having fun: time, energy, and money. If you have all the time, energy, and money in the world, you’re unstoppable. You can do anything you want.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably lacking at least one of those three. (I’m writing it, and I know I am.)

Which one we’re lacking varies from day to day and sometimes over the course of a day. Thinking in broad strokes, each one of them takes a turn being generally scarce as we go through life. Thinking in really broad strokes, they line up with the second, third, and fourth vicennia of life.

This is the book Dr. Stephen R. Covey is best known for. It’s one of the best books on self-leadership ever. You should have a copy in your library. (Amazon agrees—it’s included with Kindle Unlimited.)

Obviously, the seven habits are the meat and potatoes of the book. The first three habits are personal; they cover how you should handle yourself, and they’re largely focused on planning and being intentional with your life. The next three habits are interpersonal—how you interact with other people. The seventh habit is a keystone habit that will make sure you never stop growing.

The habits are:

Be proactive. You are responsible for what happens in your life. You have the power and responsibility to make choices and steer your ship instead of blaming the current for where you end up.

Begin with the end in mind. All things are created twice—first mentally, then physically. You can imagine a better outcome than what you currently see and be proactive to make that outcome happen.

Put first things first. If you want to make that better outcome happen, you have to identify your priorities, place the important above the merely urgent, and let go of things that just don’t matter.

Think win-win. See life as a collaboration, not a competition. The best way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want. Any other arrangement is unsustainable.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Listen. Understand the other person’s position so well you can articulate it better than they can. Then you can build a framework for open and honest communication that will lead and influence through mutual respect instead of whoever can shout loudest.

Synergize. It’s a buzzword that’s gotten a bad rap, but it’s powerful. The whole really can (and should) be greater than the sum of its parts. It’s okay to be different, because that’s what lets synergy happen.

Sharpen the saw. There are four key aspects of your life: physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual. You have to take care of yourself in all areas in order to maintain and grow your effectiveness.

You can always read a book, put it on the shelf, and not be any different for having read it. If you will study 7 Habits and re-read the book—however many times it takes for things to start sinking in—it will transform your life. It will change the way you approach problems. It will change the way you think. It will permeate everything else you do to improve yourself, and you will improve faster.

Some inefficiencies waste more of our potential than others.

Energy is the capacity to do work. It’s stored in electrical, chemical, thermal, gravitational, nuclear, or mechanical form and transformed by machines into another form. It’s never a perfect transformation. Some of the potential is lost to inefficiency—friction, heat, vibration, noise, wear.

In a Freshman Physics class, you often model things using a spherical cow of uniform density in a vacuum (they’re also frictionless, inert, of a neutral charge…). You are taught to ignore the inefficiencies so you can focus on the larger principles.

We often make the same simplifications when we plan. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that things aren’t going to go as planned. Sound familiar? It happens because your planning model is off.

The simplest way to get more done is to remove the inefficiencies. Let more of that potential be transformed into useful work.

Let your phone work without waiting for you.

Anything you do on a regular basis (which you can’t eliminate or delegate) can and should be automated. If you have to do it, you may as well make it as easy as possible. (You’ll also waste less time procrastinating and actually do it.)

It’s not even the big things that need automated. Sometimes, it’s the small things—the deaths by a thousand cuts—that we appreciate more.

On macOS, you have AppleScript, a powerful language to create custom workflows and tie apps together. There’s also Automator, an app that lets you create workflows by combining actions with drag-and-drop simplicity—no programming required!

On iOS, there’s the aptly-named Workflow. Like Automator, you create a workflow by dragging together a series of actions. Each action performs a task and passes the result on to the next step.

To be honest, I didn’t really get what Workflow was capable of when I first heard about it. I knew how Automator (and AppleScript) worked, and I knew that wasn’t possible on an iPhone. It only made sense after I downloaded it and started using it.

So let’s create one of the workflows that I use the most: telling my wife I’m on my way home.

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